


Bibliophilia

by NancyBrown



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Mummy (1999)
Genre: Community: halfamoon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-03
Updated: 2011-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-15 08:42:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NancyBrown/pseuds/NancyBrown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Evie was a little girl, she read every single book in her parents' house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bibliophilia

**Author's Note:**

> Written for halfamoon.

When Evie was a little girl, she read every single book in her parents' house. She was halfway through her father's shelves when she ran into the books in languages she didn't know. Jonathan wanted nothing to do with their Latin lessons, only grudgingly sat through the tutor in ancient Egyptian, but Evie drank the words down, eager for ways to unlock the secrets in the rest of the books.

Books were friends when friends were few. When she lost her mother, and then her father, she kept Odysseus and Perseus, made acquaintance with the Wife of Bath. Fairy tales, legends, the stories of Set and Osiris, these could not die, could not drift away as they grew older into thoughts of drink and women. The other girls at the (ill-advised and short-attended) finishing school might tease her, but Guinevere and Launcelot would never reject her. In fact, the only thing she lacked from her fictional companions was someone whose love of books matched her own. Swords were all well and good, but couldn't just one of her heroes also wield a pen?

Her father's library gave way to other libraries, private collections, and more languages. She found the diary in Dr. Bey's personal collection and, distracted and annoyed, he made it a gift to her to get her to leave him alone to work. Evie's French was rusty, less practiced even than her Greek, and the diary lay unread while she worked on other translations. Only in the late evening, readying herself for bed but still too awake to sleep properly, did she finally open it to read the fine if spindly writing.

 _"Je m'appelle Belle."_

Evie read all night.


End file.
